“What is it?” I ask Taylor.
“You can’t really tell from the photograph,” he says. “But I got a good look at the whole apparatus before they carted him away. This strip”—Taylor uses a chewed-up pencil to point at the narrow cable in the photo—“is a plastic-jacketed wire. It would have been used to attach the body to something heavy, to weigh it down.”
“Like what?”
He shrugs. “Tough to say. This harbor is full of equipment that could weigh a man’s body down for the next century. It could’ve been just about anything. A mushroom, a trawl anchor, hell, even a decent length of sweep chain would do it.”
“But I thought it was the Dacron that sank.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “The Dacron makes the rope sink,” he says. “It wouldn’t hold a body down.”
I should’ve figured that much out for myself, of course. I’m lost, so I decide to move on for a minute. Sometimes that helps. “And what’s this?” I ask, pointing to the little eyelet on the end.
“That’s a pop-up,” he says. “Or part of one anyhow.”
I’m in a vocabulary class, it seems. “Help me here,” I tell Taylor. “To me, a pop-up is one of the little creatures that jumped off the storybook page when Luke was a toddler.”
He laughs. “Well, to us,” he says, “us fisher types, a pop-up is a TFR—a timed float release.” He smiles at me and tugs at his short, dark beard. He knows I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He also knows I desperately want to.
“Spill,” I tell him, “or I’ll be unavailable the next time one of your crewmen calls from lockup after the barrooms close.”
He laughs again, harder. “Whoa,” he says, “take it easy. That’s my livelihood you’re talking about. Them’s fightin’ words.”
I rest my forearms on the fish tote and wait.
“TFRs,” he says, “are underwater timers. They have a lot of uses, but around here they’re most often used to hide gear.”
“Hide gear?”
“Right,” he says. “If you’ve got traps set in the channel, say, and you’re not going to check them for a few days, you can use TFRs to hold the buoys and the lines underwater for that long. From the surface, no one can tell where your traps are.”
“So no one can steal your catch?”
He shrugs. “Some guys use them for that reason,” he says. “Poaching happens. But the bigger concern—in the channel, anyhow—is traffic. The volume of boat traffic out there is so high that gear gets taken out by accident all the time. And when that happens, you lose more than your catch. You’ve got to replace the damned gear.”
I shake my head. “But if no one else can tell where your traps are, how can you?”
“You can’t,” he says, “until the TFRs let go and your buoys pop up.”
I’m still lost and the look on Taylor’s face tells me he knows it. “Stay with me,” he says. “I can explain.”
He grabs a coffee can from the shelf behind him and roots through it. “This,” he says, handing me a small metal gadget, “is a pop-up. Just like the poly-dac, you’ll find a bunch of those in a bunch of different sizes on just about every boat in the harbor.”
This one is a little bigger than my thumb, a pewter-colored barrel with an eyelet on either end.
“If I’m not going to check my traps for a week,” he says, “I can use one of these on each of them. I attach one end of it to the trap, the other to the buoy. The weight of the trap holds the buoy—and the lines—down. My gear sits on the ocean floor, out of traffic, for the week.”
“And then?”
“And then the pop-up releases,” he says. “It lets go in the middle and my buoy floats to the surface when I want it to.”
“It’s accurate?”
“You bet it is,” he says. “It’s a little more complicated than I’m making it sound, though. Water temperature plays a part too—”
“Please,” I interrupt. “Keep it simple. Remember your audience.”
He smiles at me. “The bottom line is, if I know the size of the TFR that was used and the average water temperature for the time period we’re talking about, I can be out there in time to watch the gear float to the surface.”
I’m quiet for a minute, still fingering the little metal device.
“They come in different sizes,” Taylor says, “for different durations. Two-day, five-day, seven-day, you name it.”
I look up at him. I still don’t get it.
“That’s a seven-day,” he says, pointing to my pop-up. “And so is this.” He uses the pencil again and taps the photo of Herb Rawlings’s ankles. “But this is just one end of it. It would’ve let go in the middle, remember. The other end is still attached to whatever held the guy down there for a week.”
“Taylor, please, I still don’t understand. Can you just tell me what you’re thinking and why?” I’m starting to worry about time. My head aches. And I’ve got to escape these codfish guts.
“I’m just about there,” he says. “But I have a question for you first.”
“Just one?”
He shrugs. “For now. Do you know anything about where this guy was attacked? Whether he was on land or sea?”
I shake my head. Until this morning, I’d assumed that whatever happened to Herb Rawlings happened at sea. But this morning’s discovery changed that, I realize now. “I don’t have a clue,” I tell Taylor.
“Okay,” he says, “then here’s what we do know.” He points to the little gadget in the photograph, the used version of the one I’m still fingering. “That pop-up did what it was supposed to do,” he says.
My pulse quickens a little as the pieces of what Taylor’s been telling me start to meld. “Go on,” I tell him. “Please.”
“So somebody went to great lengths to hide a body,” he says, “but secured it to the ocean floor with a device that’s specifically designed to let it go after seven days.”
“Don’t stop,” I tell him. “I’m with you.”
He leaves his seat and starts pacing, hunched over, tugging at his beard. “There are two possibilities, I guess. But only one makes sense.”
“Nothing makes sense to me right now, Taylor, so tell me both.”
“Theoretically,” he says, “it’s possible that someone clobbered the guy on land, loaded him onto the boat, and then motored out to the Great South Channel to dump him.”
“Theoretically,” I repeat. “Why just theoretically?”
“Because to do that,” Taylor answers, “whoever it was would have to know boats. And he’d have to know a hell of a lot about these waters. Because he’d have to be able to negotiate the cut.”
The cut is a treacherous stretch off the coast of Chatham that keeps the Coast Guard’s helicopter rescue team busy year-round. It’s redefined every time a winter storm pummels the coastline; every time the beaches and sandbars get rearranged; every time a waterway opens up where none existed before.
“And anybody who knows how to negotiate the cut,” Taylor points at my pop-up again, “would know a TFR when he sees one. He’d sure as hell know better than to try to hide a body with it.”
“And the other possibility?” I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming.
“Simple,” he says. “The now-dead guy was alive and well when he left the dock. He motored out to the Great South Channel himself. And then he bought the farm. Whoever did him in was on board. Someone he knew.”
“And someone who didn’t know the nautical world,” I add. “Someone who didn’t know a damned thing about pop-ups.”
Taylor tilts his head to one side. “Looks that way to me,” he says. He stops pacing and eases back onto his bait bucket. “One thing we know for sure,” he adds. “The dead guy surfaced on schedule.”
CHAPTER 17
Leon Long has been a Barnstable County Superior Court judge for two decades. Other judges of that tenure might claim to have seen it all. Not Leon. He’s fond of telling anyone who’ll listen that he hasn’t seen anything yet, that he’s just getting started. He says each day on the bench delivers spanking-new issues to tackle—both legal and moral.